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This can’t be right. How does anyone survive on that?
From what I have seen, having a lot of roomates, eating very boring food and praying to a god you don't believe in that your car doesn't break down.
I looked around and the average salary Q4 last year was over $59k.. I don’t know what the meme used for the “half” metric, but if they used the entire population of the US that would certainly drive the average down by including people of non-working age. The average I cited probably doesn’t account for unemployment, but that’s only 3.7% so that’s not going to push the cited average much lower.
If half the working-age, non-disabled adults in this country were literally only making the meme wage or less it would be incredibly dire.
That website seems to be doing the mean average. The median average is 41k currently, and back in 2020 median income was 35k, so the OP post might be a few years old.
The (mean) average might be 59k now, but half of people are making below 41k. Median is generally a better stat because excessive incomes on the ends don't skew it massively. Adjusted for inflation this is essentially the exact same situation workers have been in for half a century. Wage growth is non existent, adjusted for inflation.
This is explicitly just for full-time workers. There are links on that website that show the numbers for part-time workers, which are far, far lower. The ~40k number we were posting was the average for all workers.
It's important to remember that 39.5 hours a week is part time, and a lot of low-wage jobs keep employees under full time to lower benefit requirements. So all those types of jobs aren't included in your calculation. It's better to do the median of all workers.
The 40K number is for all workers above the age of 15
I don't know about you, but I earned little income until my 20s, so if you include dependents, there's a quite a few people with no income. While they only bring the midpoint down, it's also not a fair point of comparison
None of these sources include people with no income in statistics about worker income.
My buddy worked at an ice cream parlor part time after school. He was included into the statistics because he was a worker over 15. But he was also a dependent who lived with his parents.
So when you say half of workers make X, it includes dependents who work like 10 hours a week.
Yeah, and it includes doctors making 900k a year. Medians are good because they ignore the extreme ends. It is a literal fact that half of workers in America make under 41k a year. Maybe that fact is uncomfortable, but it's an actual fact so it's something you'll have to deal with.
It seems you don't actually disagree with anything I'm saying though.
But it's not useful because the household income is over 70K
It makes it sound like half of people are supporting themselves making 40K, but that's not the case
To pretend like it says nothing about the state of the country is a complete joke.
Over half of people 18-29 are living with their parents, because you can't live on your own and save up for a house on the median income anymore. Hell, before I got laid off I was making 130k a year and still didn't move out because I knew at any point I could be let go (which is exactly what happened we got bought out and massive lay offs followed), and didn't want to throw all my money away renting.
People can't support themselves on 40k a year, so they're not. More people than ever are dependent on others to live, because they aren't being paid enough to live. I have friends (we're all in our mid 20s) who are making around the medium income. Two of them recently got let go, and were back living with their parents inside of a month because they weren't able to save any money between rent, food, and other basic necessities to live.
The average won't tell you the halfway point if the data isn't evenly distributed. The average of 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 500 is 50.9. The median is what you want for the halfway point of a set. This meme looks like it is a couple years out of date, most recent measured median from 2020 is 40,480. But the meme was accurate as of 2018.
9 people make 20k a year, 1 person makes 1,000,000 a year. Average salary is 118K, but 90% of people make less than 30k.
Not real numbers, but just to show that average does not mean "half of".
That is why the median income is more interesting.
Because it's wrong
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t02.htm
$1,145 a week is the median, do the math